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Five Days That Shook The World:
The Battle for Seattle
and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
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Published on January 30
THE TERRORIST'S
RETURN:
THE CRIMES OF SHARON
From Qibya to
Beirut:
Ariel Sharon's
Bloody Record
FAKING IT
Democrats Roll
Over on Ashcroft
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
They All Love
Anne Veneman
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Gore Gets More
Votes, Doesn't Care
What William Carlos
Williams Really
Thought About
The Beats
Published on January 15
BUSH PUTSCH
OKAYED
BY SENATE DEMS AND
BLESSED BY SUPREMES
More Scandals
of Squelched
Black Votes
Outside Florida
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
Nixon Protege Rumsfled
Returns
to Pentagon as
the Keeper of
the Trough
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Russia Nukes Itself
Deregulation in
Airlines and Energy
Published on January 5
MEET GALE NORTON
She Sought Out
James Watt, Was
Enthralled by Ayn
Rand, Did Battle
Against Gays, For
Big Tobacco, Wanted
To Trash Endangered
Species Act, Now
To Head Interior
MUZZLING WHISTLEBLOWERS
EPA Cracks Down
On Hugh Kaufman
For Telling the Truth
About Browner and
Al Gore
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Jesse Jackson
Takes a Dive
Hate Crimes and
Behavior Modification
in Albuquerque
Published on December 5
VOTING WHILE
BLACK
How Florida Kept
More than 100,000
Blacks and Other
Minorities From
Voting
CRIMINALIZING
YOUTH
The Unrelenting
War Against
America's Teens
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Kathryn, Dubya
and Jeb
Al Gore Disses
His Secret Service
Agents
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Al Gore:
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Whiteout:
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New Stories:
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February
7, 2001
Return of the Terrorist
The Crimes
of Ariel Sharon
Some incorrigible optimists have suggested that
only a right-wing extremist of the notoriety of Likud leader
Ariel Sharon will have the credentials to broker any sort of
lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Maybe so. History is
not devoid of such examples. But Sharon?
Sharon's history offers a monochromatic
record of moral corruption, with a documented record of war crimes
going back to the early 1950s. He was born in 1928 and as a young
man joined the Haganah, the underground military organization
of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he
was given command of Unit 101, whose mission is often described
as that of retaliation against Arab attacks on Jewish villages.
In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, one of
them very well known, Unit 101's purpose was that of instilling
terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence
not only on able bodied fighters but on the young, the old, the
helpless.
Sharon's first documented sortie
in this role was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig,
south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 101 unit records 50
refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20.
Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs
were thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of
huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they
were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".
In October of 1953 came the
attack by Sharon's unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya,
whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time,
Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would stick to us
and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though
even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it
to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the
West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag
of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon,
describing him as "feisty", or the
Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after
his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the
portly old warrior".
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre
thus: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses
and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success
in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full
and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was
revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village
had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown
up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children,
had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed
that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea
that anyone was hiding inside the houses."
The UN observer on the scene
reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated
time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled
across the threshhold, indicating that the inhabitants had been
forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown
up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously
in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council
dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and
Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On
14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched
a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).
According to the diplomat's
account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically
murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades
and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians
had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the
wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had
been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel
army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about
3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had
begun shelling the
neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in
Israel.
And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head
of the Southern Command of Israel's Defense Forces in the early
1970s? The Gaza "clearances" were vividly described
by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January
21 of this year.
"Thirty years have elapsed
since Ariel Sharon, favourite to win Israel's forthcoming election,
was the head of the Israel Defence Forces' southern command,
charged with the task of 'pacifying' the recalcitrant Gaza Strip
after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well.
Especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage,
or Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores of narrow,
nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a shantytown
cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for
refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for
the international community to settle their future. The street
acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr
Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of
homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli
troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through
the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian
Liberation Army.
"'They came at night and
began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red paint,'
said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. 'In the morning
they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all
the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla!
They threw everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon
brought in bulldozers and started flattening the street. He
did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would
beat people, can you imagine? Soldiers with guns, beating little
kids!' By the time the Israeli army's work was done, hundreds
of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout
the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads.
Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into
the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families,
usually those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded
into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the
Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel."
As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp
was far from the exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops
under Mr Sharon's command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza
Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives.
Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported
to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas
were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas
were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest
suspects, but to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director
of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City".
Israeli complacency leading
to their initial defeat by the Egyptians in the 1973 war was
in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability of the "Bar
Lev line" constructed by Sharon on the east bank of the
Suez canal. The Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.
In 1981 Sharon, then minister
of defense, paid a visit to Israel's good friend, President Mobutu
of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu's yacht the Israeli party was asked
by their host to use their good offices to get the US Congress
to be more forthcoming with aid. This the Israelis managed to
accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic
relations with Israel. This was not Sharon's only contact with
Africa. Among friends he relays fond memories of trips to Angola
to observe and advise the South African forces then fighting
in support of the murderous CIA stooge Jonas Savimbi.
As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second
government, Sharon was the commander who led the full dress 1982
assault on Lebanon, with the express design of destroying the
PLO, driving as many Palestinians as possible to Jordan and
making Lebanon a client state of Israel. It was a war plan that
cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese
lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli soldiers.
The Israelis bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also
oversaw the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee
camps. The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered and
a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. However, the Middle
East may have been spared worse, thanks to Menachem Begin. Just
as the '82 war was getting under way, Sharon approached Begin,
then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over
Israel's nuclear trigger to him. Begin had just enough sense
to refuse.
The slaughter in the two contiguous
camps at Sabra and Shatilla took place from 6:00 at night on
September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on September 18,
1982, in an area under the control of the Israel Defense Forces.
The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese
force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since
the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during
the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including
pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated
or disemboweled before or after they were killed.
An official Israeli commission of inquiry - chaired
by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court - investigated
the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings
(without Appendix B, which remains secret until now).
Amid desperate attempts to
cover up the evidence of direct knowledge of what was going on
by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan Commission found itself
compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had
responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated:
"It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to
the Minister of Defense for having disregarded ["entirely
cognizant of" would have been a better choice of words]
the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists
against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed
[i.e."eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take
this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists
enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed
to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures
for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition
for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders
constitute the
non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was
charged". (For those who want to refresh their memories
of Operation Peace for Galilee, of the massacres and the Kahan
coverup we recommend Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle.)
Sharon refused to resign. Finally,
on February 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense
minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without
portfolio.
Sharon's career was in eclipse,
but he continued to burnish his credentials as a Likud ultra.
Sharon has always been against any sort of peace deal, unless
on terms entirely impossible for Palestinians to accept. As Nehemia
Strasler outlined in Ha'aretz on January 18 of this year, in
1979, as a member of Begin's cabinet, he voted against a peace
treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of
Israeli troops to the
so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed
Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993
he voted No in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following
year he abstained in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty
with Jordan. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997 and
objected to the way in which the withdrawal from southern Lebanon
was conducted.
As Begin's minister of agriculture in the late
1970s he established many of the West Bank settlements that are
now a major obstruction to any peace deal. His present position?
Not another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West
Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state on the existing areas
presently under either total or partial Palestinian control,
amounting to merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will
retain control of the highways across the West Bank and the water
sources. All settlements will stay in place with access by the
IDF to them. Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty
and he plans to continue building around the city. The Golan
heights would remain under Israel's control.
It can be strongly argued that
Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments,
without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. For example:
Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli
government has condoned settlements and
building around Jerusalem. It was Labor's Ehud Barak who okayed
the military escort for Sharon on his provocative sortie that
sparked the second Intifada and Barak who has overseen the lethal
military repression of recent months. But that doesn't diminish
Sharon's sinister shadow across the past half century. That shadow
is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving for the
dead, the maimed, the displaced, or by
a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Sharon
recently when he visited her agricultural high school outside
Beersheva. "I think you sent my father into Lebanon",
Ilil said. "Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me
suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my
father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things
that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think
that you can now be elected as prime minister".
Ilil was wrong. He's there.
And now the bloodbath will begin. CP
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